Online Plagiarism: How To Detect, Fight And Report The Unlicensed Republication Of Your Content

Is another web site stealing and republishing your content without any credit or link back? Have you discovered blogs that republish your feeds and articles just like they were theirs? Are you getting worried about online plagiarism? Relax. Plagiarism as described above is all over the place and there are thousands of web sites that have their content stolen, scraped and republished with no credit or attribution to the original author. But as a professional web publisher you are not completely powerless, nor alone.

Photo credit: Chris Lamphear

There is a great number of tools, services and procedures you can adopt to discover, prevent, discourage and outright report any instance of unauthorized or unlicensed republication of your content and this MasterNewMedia guide has been prepared with this very goal in mind: to help you combat online plagiarism.

1) First of all, you may want to scan the web from time to time to check if your content has been republished elsewhere without acknowledging you as the original author. There are lots of useful tools like Copyscape that can help you detect online plagiarism.

Either with a short paragraph or the whole article, someone who republishes one of your posts without giving you full credit is infringing the law. And if that someone is also making money out of your content, things get worse.

2) Generally, when you discover that you have been plagiarized, you can write an email to the webmaster of the malicious website or their hosting provider, letting them know the situation and requiring immediate cancellation of your duplicate content.

3) If for some reason you are unable to reach the webmaster or you receive no reply after a few days, you can file a report to search engines to denounce that someone is stealing your content. Usually search engines will promptly help you, because they do not like having duplicate content scattered all around.

4) Optionally, you can resort to an attorney and ask her to proceed legally against the owners of the website that is stealing your website content.

In this MasterNewMedia guide you will learn how to properly detect, fight and report the unauthorized republication of your content to stay on guard if you are the next victim of content scrapers.

The guide is divided in three sections:

a) A selection of valuable articles about online plagiarism covering different grounds, such as the difference between plagiarism, copyright infringement and "fair use", how to fight unlicensed content republication and how to monetize the re-use of your content across the web.

b) A collection of the best free online plagiarism checker tools to detect plagiarism. These tools allow you to scan the web for exact content matches with your articles or even similar instances of sentences that resemble your writing style.

c) The last section will help you file and send your plagiarism report to competent authorities or search engines. With a plagiarism report you can document the unlicensed republication of your content, demand immediate cancellation of the duplicate content and have the malicious website removed from search engines.

How To Detect and Fight The Unlicensed Republication of Your Content

Contrary to popular belief, the word plagiarism is not synonymous with copyright infringement. Not every incident of plagiarism is copyright infringement, and not every incident of copyright infringement is plagiarism. On a related note, not all reuse of copyrighted material is copyright infringement or plagiarism. Some uses are perfectly legal and ethical, thus getting them dubbed "fair use". What is the difference?

When you quote, discuss, report an idea or a concept, it is very important that you give credit where it is due. This is especially true in the online world where you have no control if someone copy / paste your writing and re-uses it somewhere else without your consent. So how can you recognize when someone is stealing your online content?

How can you detect online plagiarism? And, once detected, what can you do about it? If you are concerned about other people stealing your hard work, your traffic and populating the web with penalizing duplicate content, have a look at what the guys at SmallBiz Marketing Tips have to advise.

Darren Rowse from Problogger describes a real-life case of a website stealing his content and making money out of it. What can you do to stop the unauthorized republication of your content if this happens to you? Darren reports all the steps you should take.

Your content is a part of you, and is part of your online legacy. You do not want someone plagiarizing it and using it in ways that are inappropriate, or counter to your beliefs. So how do you stop online plagiarism of your content? Here is a step-by-step guide to regain control of your online work.

No longer does a copyright holder have to wait to accidentally discover plagiarism or hope that a bystander will alert them, no longer is enforcement a long, arduous process. Every webmaster, no matter how small, has the tools they need to track and stop theft of their content. Learn how.

Content theft via RSS feeds is probably the biggest challenge for you and other web publishers. If your website is syndicating full text RSS feeds this makes life easy for scrapers as well as they can automatically republish your article on their own website without having to do anything. How can you protect your syndicated content?

Bloggers generally get a rush when we see others linking to posts and reading RSS feeds, since it usually means that these individuals find value in what they have to say. Unfortunately, not everyone who reads your blog does so for legitimate reasons. Some unscrupulous individuals are only out to scrape your content for their own websites, ripping off your material and claiming it as their own. What can you do about it?

In this article, content media expert John Blossom, guides you in exploring the potential content licensing and distribution opportunities that can emerge from looking at unlicensed online content republication with a new pair of glasses and some new, truly powerful tools.

Best Free Tools To Detect and Fight Online Plagiarism

Copyscape

Copyscape is a free online plagiarism checker that allows you to discover unauthorized copies of your writings on the web. You just need to copy and paste the URL you want to check and Copyscape will scan the web for you providing several alternatives to browse. You can also set alerts for $4.95/month by joining Copysentry or go premium for 5/c per search to have unlimited searches.

DOC Cop

DOC Cop is a free online tool to detect plagiarism that checks and displays all the possible correlations and matches between web documents or between a web document and a web page so you can evaluate if your online content has been republished without approval. You can either scan DOC and PDF files and choose to receive your report in HTML or DOC formats. When comparing documents, you can evaluate up to eight different writings at a time. Registration is compulsory to utilize the service.

PlagiarismChecker.com

PlagiarismChecker.com is a free service to detect if your online content has been plagiarized. Simply copy and paste a couple of sentences from a document inside the search box and search for any unauthorized copy of your writing. You can search either using Google or Yahoo! and you also have the option to create a Google Alert to be e-mailed automatically when instances of your sentences are found online.

CopyrightSpot

CopyrightSpot is a free online plagiarism checker that allows you to detect any unauthorized republication of your content across the web. Simply type a web addresses or blog feed into the search field and check the results to discover whether your content has been stolen or scraped.

Plagium

Plagium is a free web service to discover any unlicensed re-use of your online content. Paste a relevant snippet of text inside the search box and set a couple of options to detect plagiarism of your content. You can search over the web, news content, both and in any language.

Dupli Checker

***DEAD

Dupli Checker is a free online anti-plagiarism tool that will help you discover if your content has been republished elsewhere on the web without your consent. Simply copy and paste an entire document, relevant keywords or sentences (with and without quotes) to begin. You can also directly upload a TXT document if you prefer. the search engines available to use are Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

http://www.duplichecker.com/

The Plagiarism Checker

The Plagiarism Checker is a free web-based tool to discover if your content has been republished online without your avail. You can copy and paste a relevant paragraph inside the search box to start scanning the web. The Premium version, priced at $8/month, allows you to upload MS Word documents and is reported to be three times more accurate in finding matches with similar online content.

Reprint Writers

Reprint Writers offers a free online plagiarism checker tool to detect the unlicensed republication of your articles on the web. Once you copy and paste the body of your article inside the search box, the tool uses the Yahoo! search engine to report matches with other pieces of writing that are published online.

Scirus

Scirus is a highly-customizable search engine that allows you to check whether your academic paper has been plagiarized on the web. Simply type a sentence from your document between quotes or type a set of relevant keywords to get started. Scirus is also available with a Firefox search plugin, as an embeddable search engine for your website and with an Internet Explorer toolbar.

Tynt

Tynt is an online tool to prevent online plagiarism. You just need to install a tiny script of code on your web site and Tynt will automatically add a link back to one of your web pages whenever somebody copies a piece of written content from it. Tynt is free to use and also provide detailed analytics on all backlinks you get using the service.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a free web-based proofreading service that can also help you fight online plagiarism. The service analyzes all the sentences of your selected text and then provides you with precise references to the plagiarized content online. No registration is needed to utilize the service.

If you detect your online content has been plagiarized and someone is stealing your traffic (and eventually making money out of it), you can report the situation to search engines who have the power to take action and filter the malicious website out of search results. In this article you will find a guide to report unauthorized republication of your content to Google, Yahoo! and other minor search engines.

Whether you make your income from writing online, or you just like to blog for fun, you do not want your writing to be plagiarized. Unscrupulous individuals or websites may use your writing without permission and think you will never find out. However, there are ways to report plagiarism to Google online

You can indeed take action against other people republishing your content without your consent. To denounce to search engines or legal authorities the unlicensed distribution of your writings, CheckForPlagiarism.net has prepared a sample report you can download for free and use right away. A guide to understand how to file the plagiarism report is also available.

Google provides a specific resource page where you can find all the information to prepare and send a report if you believe your online content has been republished without your approval. The form of notice specified is consistent with the form suggested by the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The Spam Report is an online form where you can tell Google if someone is stealing your online content or messing around with your website. Each compliant filed is investigated by Google and when a genuine abuse is detected Google blocks scrapers and spammers to be indexed inside result pages.

If you believe that an AdSense publisher is illegally copying the content of your website, you can send a notice of alleged infringement by following the procedure described inside the AdSense Help center. Once Google receives your report, the team will investigate the issue it and then take proper action if a violation of AdSense policy is discovered.